Systems architect and engineer Judith Myerson explains the ins and outs of wireless robots: their components, their shortcomings, and how they can interact in a competitive or cooperative team within professional environments. Learn how smarter robots can relieve us of the most tedious -- and dangerous – tasks.

Most of us have (or could if we really want) decent PCs but there's not many ropots around and they are very developed. It appears to be that the robot industry is about to enter the same phase the PC industry was in in the late 70's.

I read today of a robot prototype that runs without any batteries, it is powered by eating flies or insects. It has to eat insects in order to survive, and that's kind of cool in my opinion, it doesn't have any batteries what so ever.

A human being doesn't have any batteries, so why should robots. I'm looking forward to robots being developed, and I think that it's a million more times interesting than the PC market. I'd much rather build my own robots and develop software for them, than fiddle around with a PC.

The PC has some real short commings for a programmer. I've always felt that way. It's kind of depressing to know that certain programs require millions of lines of code and there are no robots that will help you, it's a real test of futility. I hope that the market shifts and becomes a lot more intersting.

I think its bound to happen especially with the ageing population at a lot of young people these days not wanting or not sticking around in labouring jobs preferrng high paid tech jobs instead.

Perhaps the industry will have a lot of analogies with BOTH the PC and the auto-mobile industry. I hope it is closer to the PC industry though with standard architectures that we can all implement and develop.

I like your point about the futility of programming PCs. Perhaps there will be new API's and new ways of programming robots.

There are vendor API's for robot solutions from IBM. That's fine, but I was hoping for a different kind of system. One in which a vendor doesn't set any behavior in a customers robot, but has the ability to control a robot through a language that the customer does not know. As a customer I want a lot of freedom in determining my robots behavior and other things, but a vendor can control my robot at a higher level.

One of the huge problems in the current IT industry for the customer is that he has no freedom, he is dependant upon a vendor to do just about anything, to fix any problem, with closed source. On the other hand with open source, there is freedom, but all of the work is left to the customer and the vendor can be isolated.

With robots, this would be different, because it's a better market. A ceiling can be set by a vendor that allows a customer a lot of freedom, and the robot can upgrade itself, it can do it's own customer service. It's kind of like the Linux world however there is someone there to help, the robot itself will help you to accomplish your goals, it will work with your requests, to find a personalized solution. The vendor does not have a hand in this, yet he is not isolated, because the vendor still controls the robot at a higher level.

This is logical, that people need a more personalized service, and a vendor needs to maintain control, yet these two oposite forces can co exist if there is a higher ceiling, and if there isn't than happiness can not exist, the system is not able to handle enough complexity, the child is not able to grow up.

Did anyone else feel the article was condescending and written for complete simpletons? The "Pitfalls" and solutions were particularly hilarious.

Viruses? Install AV software.
Vibration? Test then modify to make it not vibrate.
Security? Do something to make it secure.
Batteries run down? Use bigger batteries or redesign to use less power.
Pointers? Use ADA.

That's the sort of stuff you'd write for 5 year olds. "Careful, Kenny, hold the glass level or else the water will fall out!"

I was insulted by the article and don't remember ever having read a 1st graders primer any time previously on OSNews... I expect more.

so i go into the warehouse where the robots are sorting boxes. there are 10 windows robots and 1 macintosh robot. the windows robots claim they are fast and cheap, but the macintosh robot claims that it is really faster, and does a better job, is easier to communicate with, and doesn't slack off as much on the job.

so i said to him, that's great but here at widgetdepot we have a team enviroment, and there is no I in team ...